Well, it looks like most of the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee weren't swayed by this morning's New York Times editorial, which cited this morning's Committee meeting to consider USA PATRIOT Act renewal as a "critical chance to add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses that contribute nothing to making America safer." Instead, the Committee just passed a bill to renew all of the PATRIOT powers that were set to expire at the end of the year, with only a handful of the original reforms that were first proposed by Senators Feingold and Durbin's JUSTICE Act and Committee Chairman Leahy's original PATRIOT renewal bill.

Today EFF along with the ACLU and the privacy authors and publishers they represent, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries, CDT, EPIC, SFLC, Professor James Grimmelman sent a joint letter to Google urging it to include privacy protections along with its reconsidered Google Book Search Settlement.

Unfortunately, it appears that the only television news network that's been regularly covering the PATRIOT Act renewal process in Congress has been FOX News, and their coverage has seemed a lot more like pro-PATRIOT propaganda than unbiased news reporting. Fortunately, Julian Sanchez of The Cato Institute has been fact-checking them closely, in this detailed blog post and in this illuminating video:

Building on a prior ruling, a federal court has re-affirmed that a Seattle man was not infringing copyright law by re-selling software he obtained from an Autodesk customer.

The ruling is bound to frustrate the copyright industries, which have struggled for years to convince courts and their customers that the only thing you “buy" when you buy software is a limited and temporary right to use that software under certain conditions. In other words, they claim buyers aren't owners.

Over the past day, Everyonehasbeenreporting about the arrest last month of Elliot Madison for twittering about police movements to protesters during the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA.

The reason this is being reported on now is because on last Thursday, the FBI also raided Mr. Madison's home in Queens, NY, followed on Friday by Mr. Madison's filing of a motion in the Eastern District of New York federal court in Brooklyn for the return of his seized property.

Today, EFF joined an amicus brief in Bilski v. Kappos, a closely-watched case that will be decided by the Supreme Court later this year. At stake is whether the Supreme Court will limit the patentability of "business methods."

Just over ten years ago, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals handed down State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, opening the doors to patents for novel methods of doing business. That ruling knocked patent law loose from its historical moorings and injected patents into business areas where they were neither needed nor wanted. The results have been nothing short of disastrous: a flood of patent applications for services like arbitration, tax-planning, legal counseling, charity fundraising, and even novel-writing.

Yesterday's Senate Judiciary mark-up of legislation to renew expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act was extremely disheartening--in particular because of many committee Democrats' failure to support new civil liberties reforms to PATRIOT(see our summary here). Those Senators who failed to stand foursquare behind Americans' right to privacy against government spying should be on notice that Americans who care about civil liberties are very disappointed; those that did stand up for our rights deserve our vocal thanks.

This morning is the Senate Judiciary Committee's meeting to amend (or "mark up") and vote on USA PATRIOT Act renewal legislation; the discussion of PATRIOT is currently ongoing and you can watch the live webcast here.

So far, not so good. The first order of business was an amendment in the form of a substitute to Committee Chairman Leahy's base bill, which was negotiated between him and Senator Feinstein who heads the Intelligence Committee; that bill is here. The amendment was accepted at the beginning of the mark-up without discussion.